New video from St. Louis town hall beating

klickink.wordpress.com on August 8, 2009 at 7:50 PM

You’re right about the schools, especially about the folks who stayed in them and took over. The most astonishing realizations of my life came from knowing women who were 10 or more years younger than me, and hearing the kind of confusion they had about concepts like up and down.

My daughter, who was the greatest kid going, was taken from me at 5 years old when her mother left. She’s soon to be 44, beautiful and the greatest natural singer I’ve ever known. She’s never tried being married, is absolutely consumed with anger, and buys the Leftie line down to the commas.

warbaby on August 8, 2009 at 8:05 PM

But, I believe that most of them in that scene went along for the ride and as 1970 approached they just became angrier and meaner. Within a few years they were discoing and snorting coke. Now they’re undergoing a second guilt trip as they enter their twilight years.

Dr. ZhivBlago on August 8, 2009 at 10:47 PM

I think you’ve got that just right. My point, of course, is that the ’60s consisted of a lot more than just what started around 1966 or 67. The sense of possibility and freedom for poor and family-less kids like me was beyond liberating; every kind of art and literature was exploding, and we really did, I think, believe we could change the world, and raise our children with a sense of openness and love instead of just teaching them to compete with each other.

Music of every sort, not just rock, was opened up to a new generation of artists – people like Robert Crumb (and me) discovered a treasure trove of earlier Americana, and spent years of our lives learning early 20th century jazz and blues. The second generation of Bluegrass musicians changed the sound of country and popular music forever (everybody my age plays the guitar, it seems – and when I started there was no way to learn it except the old-fashioned “listen, watch and try”.)

Early music was still locked into Musicology courses in graduate schools. Now there are American artists like the American Bach Soloists and Philharmonia Baroque that are recognized all over the world for the immediacy and excitement of their production of 300 year old cantatas and oratorios, and guys like me have found a whole new sense of meaning by studying and performing Bach arias.

Ken Kesey exploded the whole concept of the American novel with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and more profoundly Sometimes a Great Notion. Tom Wolfe, and to a lesser although more notorious degree Hunter Thompson, introduced the world to prose that read like a Warner Brothers’ cartoon, and generations since have tried to reproduce it. Experimental filmmakers eventually caused Hollywood to reach, in the early ’70s, what was arguably the acme of American cinema. All that came from the ’60s, and it happened before there were hippies.

For a really clear look at what was going on in the latter part of that decade, though, check this out. This blog is written by a guy who was in high school in Canada in the ’70s. As I’ve noted before, I’ve met a truly astonishing number of people who ran smack into the insanity in the school system in the ’70s, and didn’t have either your foundation or the strength to see through it. Their spiritual descendants are the confused, angry hipsters that you see bloviating (and embarrassing themselves) on KOS, DU, etc. – a generation of 2-year-olds that will never be capable of growing up, and approach every situation with the strategy of screaming until everybody else gives up.

That’s the legacy of the Left, and a lot of us who went through the ’60s never bought it. It matters to me that the world recognizes that it was a lot more than just hippies and spoiled Baby Boomers.

warbaby on August 9, 2009 at 3:21 AM